The present invention relates to windshield shelter, and more particularly to an automobile windshield shelter which can be installed to both the front and rear automobile windshields for covering the entire window area.
Most drivers experience that when their vehicles are parked outdoor in sunshiny day time, the sun radiation may directly shine on the vehicles. The heat conducted to the vehicles' interiors raises the interior temperature and may damage the electronic equipment on the front dash board. The airtight interior of the vehicle will become hot and stuffy for re-entrance and, especially, the steering wheel will become hand burning. The driver has to open the doors first to enable air circulating for a while until the interior temperature decreases, and then starts the engine to run the air conditioning before the driver and the passengers get in the vehicle. It wastes a lot of time so that some impatient people may rush in the vehicle and drive. The extremely hot interior may affect the driving attention of the driver. Moreover, the burning steering wheel is too hot to handle.
Two common devices are currently used to solve the aforesaid problems, which are a cardboard shelter and a twisted shelter for covering the front windshield of a vehicle. The cardboard shelter is made of hard cardboard paper and is foldable. The twisted shelter is made of nyloncloth with two circular springs mounted therein and is also foldable by twisting. Such conventional shelters are very troublesome that the driver has to unfold and extend it to cover the entire front windshield while parking and has to refold and remove it from the front windshield before driving. The folding and unfolding, as well as the installing and removing operations are troublesome and time consumable since the interior space of a vehicle is too narrow for operating a shelter as large as the windshield. Moreover, we need to reserve some room for storing up the conventional extensible shelter when it is not used. The most essential shortcoming of such conventional extensible shelters is that, since the space between the front windshield and the steering wheel and the rear view mirror is so narrow, every time when they are extended to cover or removed form the windshield, the rear view mirror may be bumped to displace from its original position. The driver has to reset the rear view mirror before driving.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,197,503 disclosed a motorcar sun-shade which comprises a supporting frame assembly and a covering supported by the frame for covering the top portion of a motorcar. Since such configuration consists of many parts and is very troublesome to operate, it is not popular in the market.
Conventional continuously unfurlable car window shade, such as U.S. Pat. No. 5,036,898, is used for front windshield shading. The driver has to install the apparatus and pull the elastic shade cloth out to cover a portion of the windshield every time. This apparatus has the following shortcomings that it can only cover a portion of the windshield but not the entire area and the apparatus is merely mounted on the windshield by sucking elements.